Great Leaps does not seem to have many stories written involving important content education. Why not?
Great Leaps has a goal and we work toward that goal as efficiently as possible. Our goal is to take a non-fluent reader and get that student to fluency (reading approaching the rate of conversation with deep understanding) as fast as possible. Evidence indicates that processing puts a step between reading and fluency. Since we are only working one-minute per day on story-reading fluency, efficiency matters greatly. It is not the intent of Great Leaps to increase a childs bank of internal knowledge; it is our intent to get the student reading fluently as quickly as we know how. We have found that when a student tries to process information and read fluently at the same time, the processing interferes with the fluency-building. This is one of the reasons the stories have been written at the conversational level and the phrases including the 750 words most commonly used in conversational English.
